1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular to a computer implemented method, data processing system, and computer program product for nominating rules or policies for promotion through a policy hierarchy.
2. Description of the Related Art
As business needs and infrastructure requirements become more complex, software applications are required to contain more “intelligence” about their surroundings, including knowing how the application should behave and how the application should interact with the infrastructure around it. More importantly, it is necessary that the behavior of an application reflect more of the process flow of the business, and less of the configuration settings of the installer. To address these issues, many existing applications now employ embedded policy engines. Policies are originated at a central authority and are then distributed throughout the lower levels of the enterprise. However, in many situations, rules and policies originate in fixes and optimizations derived by local administrators, who are typically located at the bottom-most layer of the enterprise. A lack of cross-communication among these local administrators, of which there may be thousands in an enterprise across the globe, can result in these changes being isolated. In other words, the local administrators are effectively working in isolation, and thus changes made by one local administrator will not be known by other administrators. Thus, each administrator may end up solving the same problems individually, since there is currently no mechanism for easily sharing policy information from the leaf to the root of the enterprise hierarchy tree.